Sunday, September 7, 2014

Muhammad Iqbal (Urdu: محمد اقبال‎) (1877 – 1938) was a poet and politician in British India. His voice is an important counterpoint to the syncretist Sufi; during his lifetime Iqbal underwent a transformation from Indian to Muslim.

Written in 1904, Iqbal's Saare Jahan Se Achchha Yeh Hindustan Hamara (Better Than the Whole World This Hindustan of Ours) quickly became an anthem of opposition to the British rule in India. The song, an ode to Hindustan—the land comprising present-day Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan—both celebrated and cherished the land even as it lamented its age-old anguish. It remains one of the most popular of Urdu songs to this day.

Later in life, Iqbal wrote another song for children, Tarana-e-Milli (Anthem of the Religious Community), which was composed in the same metre and rhyme scheme as Saare Jahan Se Achcha, but which renounced much of the sentiment of the earlier song. The sixth stanza of Saare Jahan Se Achchha is:

No more has Love that fire, no more beauty that cheer
Neither anguish in Ghaznavi nor hair-lock-curls of Ayaz are

Mahmud of Ghazni (971-1030), founder of the Ghaznavid Empire, fell in love with Malik Ayaz, a Turkish slave who was rewarded with generalship, and their relationship became the epitome of idealized love in Islamic literature. The story goes that Ayaz asked Mahmud who the most powerful man in the kingdom was. When the sultan replied that it was himself, Ayaz corrected him, claiming that in fact Ayaz was the most powerful, since Mahmud was his slave. “Slave to a slave” became a favorite trope in Persian literature. One day, Ayaz sported a lock of wanton curl in his hair, which so aroused the Sultan's lust that he had to remove himself lest the sin of carnality be committed and the general turned into a catamite. Upon his return, he observed that sensing Mahmud's discomfiture (or perhaps out of more prosaic precaution) Ayaz had cut off the incendiary lock.

Even as I lower'd my head in prostration a cry arose from the ground:
Thy heart's in Beloved-idolatry, what reward wilst thou for prayer get?

In a letter to Jinnah in 1937 Iqbal wrote:

"A separate federation of Muslim Provinces, reformed on the lines I have suggested above, is the only course by which we can secure a peaceful India and save Muslims from the domination of Non-Muslims. Why should not the Muslims of North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations entitled to self-determination just as other nations in India and outside India are."

This makes him an early proponent of the two-nation theory which resulted in the partition of India. In another ghazal he says:

The lion who had emerged from the desert and toppled the Roman Empire is

As I am told by the angels, about to get up again.

You the dwellers of the West, should know that the world of God is not a shop ...

Your civilization will commit suicide with its own daggers.

It has been noted that Iqbal’s politics routed through his poetry keeps him firmly in place as Pakistan’s supreme icon today. Like Samuel Huntington he frames the world exclusively in terms of us-versus-them and the superiority of one civilization over all others. More on Pervez Hoodbhoy's take on Iqbal is here.